Saturday, 1 August 2009

Swine Flu fatality of Saudi Arabia is 1.7%

This is only the case fatality rate and is consistent with Spanish Fluin 1918 except that it is Summer in Saudi Arabia.

Malaysia, which is also experiencing summer, has fatality rate ofabout 0.4% which is much higher than the summer of Spanish Flu.

The data for Saudi Arabia is troubling because the number is stillsmall. The true fatality is therefore much higher since it took morethan 7 days to kill a Swine Flu patient.

You can always claim that many cases are not recorded, but similarlymany deaths are not recorded, and in 1918, many cases were also notdetected. So the figure is useful as a comparison only, not as anabsolute number.

But we all know that it has caused massive suffering in New York in1918, so it will affect our nations similarly if the same fatalityrates were not reduced much further.

It is made much worse compared to 1918, because we are supposed tohave treatment for flu(Tamilflu) that is extremely effective and wehave powerful respirators that can prolong someone with pneumoniasymptoms.

Health official Khaled al-Merghalani says the two new victims died onFriday. He didn't reveal their nationalities.

Saudi's earlier swine flu deaths were a 30-year-old Saudi man and a 28-year-old Indonesian woman. Both died earlier this week.

The kingdom has registered 230 cases of swine flu _ the most in theArab world.

With the latest Saudi deaths, the Mideast has had five fatalities inthe pandemic.

The July 19 death of an Egyptian woman, who had returned from apilgrimage to Saudi Arabia, prompted Arab health ministers to banchildren, the elderly and chronically ill from attending this year'shajj pilgrimage to the kingdom.